Everybody Chew Their Tough Turkey

When the narrator of Gish Jen’s story “Who’s Irish?” makes her tough turkey comment, she means it literally, because the implied setting is Thanksgiving dinner. I say, implied because that setting is achieved without any words wasted on interior decorating or elaborate scene development.

She’s right, we should broaden our horizons, say one brother, Jim, at Thanksgiving. Forget about the car business. Think about egg rolls. [4]

My page references are to the 1999 Vintage paperback edition of Who’s Irish?]




Without providing any further details Jen has, in the above selection, conveyed the whole Thanksgiving meal scene where one is captive to blowhards and insufferable dreamers. And Jen also allows the narrator to quickly put them in their place.

I say, You people too picky about what you sell. Selling egg rolls not good enough for you, but at least my husband and I can say, We made it. What can you say? Tell me. What can you say? [5]

Which is a great example of how to use the character’s voice rather than the authorial voice to make a point. Notice, though, how these are not just words put into the mouth of the character—the attitude expressed originates from the character’s experience. The opinions expressed have authenticity because their expression combines an idiom with its history. Opinions formed from life, expressed in a language that seems unique to the character. Earlier in the story Jen used the following sentences to establish the narrator’s/character’s authority:

Why the Shea family have so much trouble? They are white people, they speak English. When I come to this country, I have no money and do not speak English. But my husband and I own our restaurant before he die. Free and clear, no mortgage. [4]

Notice the economy of how character backstory is introduced. And not just stated, but used to convey an attitude, while also continuing to develop the narrator’s voice. No mere facts, but exposition used as ammunition. So that when we see the narrated sentence, “Everybody chew their tough turkey” we recognize that the character/narrator/author is saying of the fictional Shea’s and the real world type they represent, and with all sarcastic intent, “tough turkey.” We don’t read that sentence literally as they are eating overcooked turkey. We recognize it as “tough shit,” an unsympathetic dismissal of the Shea’s complaints. Or perhaps they are chewing on their failure, as in "a turkey.” And she’s certainly “talked turkey” by delivering bluntly a hard truth to the inept Shea’s, the “turkeys.” Another example of how Jen makes her words do double and triple duty.

Here’s a Gish Jen interview, and a video of her reading at Lannan.

A Spanner in the Gears

One last follow-up on “Sister.” The story is exquisitely crafted. This kind of craft, however, is out of fashion today, mainly because of all the MFA trained writers out there—let’s face it, that’s the audience who read literary stories. For such highly trained readers the craft in “Sister” is as visible as are the gears beneath a transparent watch face. The trained writer/reader can follow Wolff’s moves sentence by sentence. I have to wonder, though, if this is only a criticism a trained writer could levy. Would a reader without such exposure to craft see the gears turning? Or would the face of the watch remain opaque?

Briefly those elements of craft that Wolff employs so well are his use of sensory and concrete details, the symbolic action, and in particular, his use of call and response motifs from the beginning of the story to the end: the brother hunting, the joint, the barking dog, the boys playing football, and Marty’s exercises on the porch. Those are the gears turning. That said, this is still a great story to learn from. Even if you subscribe to the current vogue of “make it messy,” you may still need to learn how to do it clean, if for no other reason than that it then becomes easier to throw a spanner into the gears.

I’ll end my discussion of “Sister” with a beautiful piece of Wolff’s craft that I think is far less transparent—the conversation between Marty and the two men in the park. There's these great moments when the lies come out:

“What’s your name?” She asked.
Jack answered for him. “His name is Jack,” he said.
The tan one laughed. “Brother,” he said, “you are too much.”

[and a bit later in the conversation]

“So,” she said “do you guys know each other?”
Jack stared at her for a moment longer, then nodded. “All our lives,” he said.
The tan one shook his head and laughed. “Too much,” he said.

These lines take their power from the reader hearing them from Marty’s point of view. We know that Jack is lying and that gives the “too much” amplitude, lets us in on the joke, the complicity between the two men. It also allows us to feel something Marty misses—or at least chooses to miss—as she plans to bring a friend into the mix: we sense how separated from them she really is. Which is, of course, one of the story’s themes. And for my money, this exchange shows that theme better than all of the symbolism and epiphanies combined. That messy bit of the story—the off-kilter conversation and its subtext—does more for the story than all of the transparently unified elements of craft. That the story has both makes it a great story to learn from.

Slice-n-dice

Another follow-up on Wolff's "Sister." This story was written in the early 1980's, during a time when a popular narrative structure was the slice-of-life. As it sounds, this form focused on one point in a character's life. Going further, it severed itself from the notion that you had to know a character's life story in order to understand the action of a story, and in particular to understand how and/or why the character changed at the end of the story. The slice was crafted as a self-contained unit of meaning. Everything you needed to know about the character and how they were—or weren't—changed by the slice-of-life was woven into the details of the slice. When done well, as in "Sister," the slice captured a moment revealed to be meaningful to the character in the moment, yet also giving us the suggestion that the change reached deeper into the character's life even though we haven't been shown the rest of the character's life. When done poorly, the slice-of-life story revealed nothing more than a meaningless event. The prevalence of those poorly done stories, and too few stories that reached the level of "Sister," helped to kill off the form.

However, a key feature of the slice-of-life story has persisted into contemporary fiction: the absence of back story, even in stories which are not slice-of-life. In such stories, we don't get a single slice, but a series of slices, so that we learn about the character by seeing her in action in a variety of situations. We don't need the life story because we have Fitzgerald's dictum: character=action. This multitude of scenes preserves the sense of discovering the character in situ—rather through narrative summary—while also addressing the primary knock against the slice-of-life, that a single slice was not enough to experience change in a character.

The Subtle Art of Revision

As I mentioned in the first posting about Tobias Wolff's story “Sister,” he made changes to the story’s ending between the version first published in Ploughshares and the version he published in his collection Back in the World. Let’s compare the differences. First the Ploughshares version:

…A few minutes ago she had nearly been killed and now there was nobody to talk to about it, to see how afraid she was and tell her not to worry, that it was over now. That she was still alive. That everything was going to be all right.

At this moment, sitting here, Marty understood that there was never going to be anyone to tell her these things. She had no idea why this should be so; it was just something she knew. There was no need for her to make a fool of herself again.

The version from Back in the World with the sentences Wolff cut in brackets:

...A few minutes ago she had nearly been killed and now there was nobody to talk to about it, to see how afraid she was and tell her not to worry, that it was over now. [That she was still alive.] That everything was going to be all right. [At this moment, sitting here,] And Marty understood that there was never going to be anyone to tell her these things. She had no idea why this should be so; it was just something she knew. [There was no need for her to make a fool of herself again.]

The first comment I have is that by combining the two paragraphs Wolff has wisely reduced the emphasis on the sentences after “And Marty understood…”, so that that part of the epiphany is less in focus.

As for the three parts of the paragraph he cut, each cut pays big dividends. Cutting “At this moment sitting here” is especially useful because that clause implies that what Marty understands is transitory, something she only understands at that moment. As I discussed in the previous posting, the final paragraph tries to show that Marty’s perception goes beyond the moment, so the “At this moment” clause clearly had to go. Likewise, the “That she was still alive” sentence places the emphasis on Marty having survived a near death experience. As I also argued, that makes the experience more transitory, and it also steers the emphasis away from the separation Marty feels between herself and the world of the “brothers.” Cutting “There was no need for her to make a fool of herself again” removes a sentence that seems way off the point of the story, its only connection being to her sense of embarrassment. It’s actually midleading, telling us a reason for why she went home that isn’t earned in the story.

I prefer the Back in the World version because it doesn't undermine the way that the final paragraph pulls the deeper meanings out of the story. I think the Ploughshares version places too much emphasis on how the near miss with the car made her feel. That's still a strong ending, but I think Wolff's revisions clearly made the ending, and thus the story, better.

These changes show that even a prize winning story can be made better by subtle revisions.

Earning the Epiphany

Simply put, an earned epiphany is one where the reader believes that the action in the story would cause the character to have the understanding they (in first-person narratives) claim for themselves, or that is attributed to them by a third-person narrator. In “Sister” the question of whether or not the epiphany is earned can be asked on two different levels. The first is whether we believe that almost being hit by the car would cause the shift in Marty’s perception that it does. And secondly, do we believe that the contents of that shift in perspective are warranted based on what else has occurred in the story.

I think that change in perspective is earned. One reason is that it works symbolically. From the moment Marty shows up at the park and recognizes one of the men as they guy that left her with a bar tab, Wolff builds up a chain of events and perceptions that feels as if Marty is getting involved in something that she shouldn’t, particularly because she either doesn’t hear the warning bells, or ignores them if she does. So the near miss with the car pulls her out of the situation, literally separates her from the two men, and serves as a wake-up call. When she looks back at them in the park “They were looking at her as if they had seen her naked, and that was how she felt—naked. She had nearly been killed and now she was an embarrassment, like someone in need.” She doesn’t go back to the park, but walks home. The near miss with the car breaks the causal chain. And by linking the near miss with Marty’s feelings of embarrassment and need, it becomes less a near death experience and more a revelation of her sense of inadequacy. Which seems to me better ground for the kind of character introspection that might lead to an epiphany.

Regarding the second aspect of the epiphany—it’s content—I think that is also earned by what occurs in the story. Wolff sets this content up quite early. In the second paragraph Marty chooses to put on old shoes because the new ones “made her feet look big.” And then there’s the great moment of recognition when she looks in the mirror and “she saw the excitement in her face, the eagerness. Whoa, she thought.” Then she thinks of brother out hunting with his friends. “She smiled, thinking of that.” Which is clearly reversed at the end. And she doesn’t smoke the joint at the beginning of the story because “she didn’t want to lose her edge.” Whereas at the end, she decides not to smoke the joint because she doesn’t want to lose the “empty and clean” feeling she has. So, this early representation of Marty’s feelings as she heads down to the park provides a context of comparison for the epiphanic feelings she has at the end of the story. We know how she felt and what she was thinking before the conversation with the two guys and the near miss with the car, so that we recognize how she feels and what she thinks during the epiphany as a modulation of her previous state of mind.

Here’s the final paragraph where Wolff backs away from that epiphany:

She watched the sky darken. Her brother and his friends would be coming off the marsh about now, flushed with cold and drink, their dogs running ahead through the reeds and the tall grass. When they reach the car they'll compare birds and pass the bottle around, and after the bottle is empty they will head for the nearest bar. Do boilermakers. Stuff themselves with pickled eggs and jerky. Throw dice from a leather cup. And outside in the car the dogs will be waiting, ears pricked for the least sound, sometimes whimpering to themselves but mostly silent, tense, and still, watching the bright door the men have closed behind them.

I say this moves away from the epiphany because it takes a mostly good feeling that Marty has —the sense of comfortable clarity after nearly being killed—and turns it into one of isolation in which she equates herself with the dogs. This is either a new epiphany, or a deepening of the previous one, that has the effect of reinforcing the currents of separateness within the story, because the two guys, like her brother and his friends, have closed her off from their world as thoroughly as if she were one of the dogs they use for hunting. This is the real fact that she is newly attentive to; like the dogs, her ears are pricked, and she is whimpering. Which makes the ending more satisfying for me because, although the first part of the epiphany was earned, I felt it was transitory, wasn’t going to be life changing, and would probably vanish once she got back into her apartment. On the other hand, this deeper understanding of her separateness from the world of the “brothers” feels more lasting, something that might stick, mainly because it is not just the result of nearly being hit by the car, but because it builds on the inherent isolation that is revealed during her conversation with the two men; which even if she wasn’t particularly aware of it at the time, we readers were. So this final paragraph brings Marty’s feelings around to where Wolff has already located the readers. The ending satisfies because we sense that Marty has learned what we already know—we sense she’s caught up.

Of Kites and Frisbees

Tobias Wolff’s story “Sister” is an epiphanic story in the tradition of Joyce’s Dubliners stories, although it also exhibits a stylistic feature—slice-of-life—which many American stories published in the early 1980’s shared. (“Sister” was first published 1983 in Ploughshares and later included in Wolff’s collection Back in the World and selected for the Prize Stories 1985: The O. Henry Awards.) I’ll take up the slice-of-life angle in a later posting because although such stories are currently out of favor, many elements of that style have persisted in contemporary short fiction.

Story endings that rely on epiphanies—despite being somewhat popular with editors at literary journals who seek a sign of change in the character—have become an easy target, for instance, see Charles Baxter’s essay “Against Epiphanies” in his book Burning Down the House, where he argues that when they occur in life they are usually false, fleeting, and don’t bear the life changing significance with which story writers privilege their characters. (Here's an interview with Baxter that contains a discussion of the essay.) Despite that back drop I do want to take a close look at how Wolff handles the epiphany in “Sister” because not only is it a textbook example, but also to show how Wolff retreats from the epiphany, which I think is the reason that the ending is so satisfying.

When discussing stories that depend on epiphanies I think it is important to examine them on their own terms—it is not enough to dismiss them simply because they use that device. Analysis of epiphanies turns on three questions: (1) What is the epiphany? (2) How is it expressed? and (3) Is it earned? This last question is the most crucial because if the epiphany doesn’t feel earned, if it fails to convince the reader, then the story itself fails.

Here’s the epiphany in the story’s final paragraphs :

She sat on the steps. From somewhere nearby a bird cried out in a hoarse ratcheting voice like chain being jerked through a pulley. Marty did some breathing exercises to get steady, to quiet the fluttering sensation in her shoulders and knees, but she could not calm herself. A few minutes ago she had nearly been killed and now there was nobody to talk to about it, to see how afraid she was and tell her not to worry, that it was over now. That she was still alive. That everything was going to be all right.

At this moment, sitting here, Marty understood that there was never going to be anyone to tell her these things. She had no idea why this should be so; it was just something she knew. There was no need for her to make a fool of herself again.

The sun was going down. She couldn't see it from where she sat, but the windows of the house across the street had turned crimson, and the breeze was colder. A broken kite flapped in a tree. Marty fingered the joint in her pocket but left it there; she felt empty and clean, and did not want to mess the feeling up. [I’m quoting her from the original Ploughshares version, of the story, and Wolff made slight, but not insignificant, changes when he published it in Back in the World. I’ll take up these changes in a later post.]

The epiphany is expressed in the context of what seems to Marty to have been a near death experience after she is almost run over by a car while chasing down a Frisbee. Shaken, she doesn’t return to the park and the two men, but instead heads home where she pauses on the steps of her building. The epiphany is then given literal expression: “At this moment, sitting here, Marty understood that there was never going to be anyone to tell her these things.” And “she felt empty and clean, and did not want to mess the feeling up.” She’s had the insight, feels changed, and wants to hold onto it.

Take some time to read through the story again, keeping in mind the question of whether and how this epiphany is earned. I’ll take that question up in my next post and also look at the final paragraph and how it retreats from the epiphany. As you read the story again, see also if you can anticipate my discussion of that retreat.

In the meantime, here are some interviews with Wolff. Salon, U of Utah, Stanford, Natterbox, and Atlantic.

Fusion and Fluidity

Further comments on Ann Bronston's story "Obedience School."

Now I'm not meaning this as a criticism, just pointing out that the story reads very much like a creative non-fiction essay. Genre fusion is not simply acceptable on today's literary scene, it is both fashionable and encouraged. Recognition that fiction is chock full of autobiography and autobiography (memoir) is likewise full of fiction. This trend is furthered by the rise of creative nonfiction tracts in MFA programs, tracts with the express focus of teaching students how to perk up their essays with the techniques of fiction. So why not turn the tables and write a fictional story that uses the techniques of creative nonfiction? If you're writing in the first-person, consider the techniques of fiction as morphed by creative nonfiction writers—they've discovered new techniques for finding the emotional center of scenes, and how to do so with voices steeped in authenticity.

So when I say this story reads like non-fiction I'm referring partly to its confessional mode—a time-honored technique of fiction writers—but more specifically I'm referring to the way the narrative feels as if the narrator is recounting the experience she had with her own children. Whether it's fiction or nonfiction is beside the point because the narrative achieves the ring of authenticity. We believe in this narrator. The voice melds form and function and propels us through to the end.

I didn't find the ending particularly satisfying, but I was impressed with Bronstons guts. She took an ending that started out quite negative—although negative in a quite typical style for contemporary fiction (one that refutes Hollywood's happy ending factory by focalizing the painful truths we all know):

I don't know what to say to him. What part of this universe can he control, not who he was born, not the family he was born to, not the thoughts that scare him at night, not the emotions that spring full-blown and uninvited, not the dreams that tear him from sleep, not the strange moments of sheer fate that rush at anyone.

And turned it mid-paragraph into a more positive, almost sappy ending:

But I tell him, "You know, a lot of children your age think that they are all-powerful, that they can make things happen, they can cause good things and bad things, but you know better, you know a secret that it takes most people a long time to figure out. You are very strong and solid and brave to know this secret, to not be afraid of things you can't control. And you will learn what's important and what thoughts and feelings to ignore. You will learn how to choose the things you want to do."

If this ending works it is because throughout the story the narrator has swung from negative to positive emotional states and behavior (did you notice the shift from anger to tenderness in the first three paragraphs?). So this ending can be accepted not as a universal statement about life, but as a moment in time that shifts from one mode to another. Because the narrator opens up—"Like the seam of the sky opening, in those few moments I believe I see inside of Jason."—the negative ending we feel coming is able to flip positive. Empathy produces that movement, allows anger to subside, and produce not an epiphany, but a sliver of understanding.